A page for women considering Ashwam — and for the partners, researchers and journalists who are too. We have tried to write what we would actually say to a friend asking, not what would sound best in a brochure.
This page evolves as Ashwam evolves. Some answers will sharpen as the platform launches and we hear what women actually want to know.
Ashwam is a personal health platform built around each woman, not around population averages. It captures structured signal across the dimensions of daily life — body, mind, emotion, sleep, food, activity — and builds a longitudinal record that learns what is normal for her, specifically.
Where most health products compare a woman to other women — the population average that says, for example, that a "normal" cycle is 28 days — Ashwam compares her to herself. If your own cycle is typically 21 days, that is your normal. The platform is being built first for women in midlife, where existing health research has historically left the largest gaps.
Ashwam learns the patterns that are yours alone — when you sleep well and why, when you eat in ways that don't agree with you, when you feel bloated and what's happening around it. A short daily check-in, five minutes, across the dimensions Ashwam thinks with — body, mind, emotion, sleep, food, activity, and the social and environmental context that shapes them. Over weeks, then months, those answers form a baseline — your normal, not the average woman's normal.
Over the months and years, when that baseline shifts, Ashwam sees the change before it becomes a symptom you cannot ignore. It surfaces the right moments to ask better questions of your body — and to get the right test, the right consultation, at the right time. The longer you use it, the clearer it gets at telling apart the noise of a single bad day from a real biological change underneath.
Wearables read what your body is doing right now — your heart, your sleep, your activity — and compare you to a manufacturer's average score (readiness, stress score, biological age, and so on). Most metrics reset within a cycle, meaning the slow patterns of midlife biology never get to compound across years.
Ashwam treats wearables — and any sensor data — as one input, not the whole story. Lived experience is the foundation. Wearable signal enriches it. If you use more than one device — say, a watch and a ring — Ashwam reconciles their different methodologies into a single picture of you, alongside what you've shared in your daily check-ins.
Most women in the world do not have a wearable. If you do, Ashwam reads its signal in. If you do not, your lived experience alone is enough to build your baseline and act on what you see.
ChatGPT is a conversation. Ashwam is a record.
A general AI assistant responds when you ask it something. Ashwam observes your daily inputs and nudges you toward what is important to focus on, before you have thought to ask. The intelligence in ChatGPT lives in the moment of the conversation. Ashwam's intelligence lives in the structured, longitudinal record of your biological signal over time — a record that exists whether you ask it anything or not, purpose-built for the patterns of women in midlife.
In an ideal world you might use both. The purposes are completely different.
One more thing that matters clinically: a general AI cannot give your doctor an audit trail of why it produced any specific answer. Ashwam can. Every signal Ashwam surfaces is traceable to your own data — which is what makes it useful in a medical conversation, not just a personal one.
Nothing special. Ashwam is designed to be inclusive of every woman, not only the ones who can afford or have access to wearables and labs. The daily check-in alone — five minutes, across the dimensions of how you are doing — is enough to build your baseline and see your patterns over time.
To put it in scale: of roughly 4 billion women in the world, around 1.7–1.8 billion have smartphones. Roughly 225–285 million women globally own a wearable (Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin and similar, capable of basic women's-health features). Ashwam is built for the women the wearables industry has not reached, alongside the women it has.
And in the other direction: the longevity industry will tell you that you need hundreds of biomarkers from premium lab panels to take care of yourself. You do not. The signal in your own daily life — how you slept, what you ate, when you felt off — is enough to build a baseline and act on it.
If you wear a watch, Ashwam reads its signal in. If you choose to add lab results, they recalibrate your baseline. Each layer adds richness, but none is required. You can start today with nothing more than your phone and your honest five minutes.
Stats synthesised from the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025, the IDC Worldwide Wearable Device Tracker, and corporate disclosures from Oura and Willow Innovations.
No. Ashwam the platform is built for every woman, across every starting point and every population.
The evidence programmes that will generate prediction models are sequenced with intent — and the first programme focuses on South Asian women, because they are among the most under-represented populations in existing women's health research. That sequencing decision is about where the research gap is largest, not about who the platform serves. From day one, Ashwam works for any woman who joins.
No. Ashwam is built for women in midlife — broadly the years across the perimenopausal transition and beyond. Many women start using Ashwam before they recognise themselves as perimenopausal, sometimes years earlier.
The longitudinal record is more valuable the earlier it begins, because perimenopausal change often shows up in patterns months before symptoms become unmistakable. If you are in your late 30s or onward, Ashwam is built with you in mind.
There is no settled term for the years between roughly 35 and 60. Medicine still organises women's health around two poles — reproduction and menopause — and treats everything in between as a transition zone, not a life stage in its own right. So women describe it in many different ways. You may have heard:
Ashwam is built for this whole stretch. That includes women who are still cycling regularly, women noticing the first irregularities, women in active perimenopause, and women in early post-menopause. The platform is designed for the pattern, not for one diagnostic label. If you have read "midlife" or "post-reproductive" anywhere on the site and weren't sure whether it included you — it almost certainly does.
In principle, yes. The philosophy behind Ashwam — longitudinal, individual-as-norm, holistic, contextual — is for any woman at any stage. We would want our own daughters to use it.
But we want to be honest about two things.
The first is design. Ashwam is calm, slow, and contextual by intent — built to surface patterns over months, not to gamify a streak or hand out a daily score. That design serves midlife well. It may or may not resonate with younger women who are used to faster, more optimisation-driven apps. We are not trying to be those apps, and we know that means Ashwam will not be the right fit for everyone in their twenties or early thirties.
The second is scope. Ashwam is not yet designed well for pregnancy or the post-partum period. These are demanding, distinct life stages with their own physiology, their own questions, and their own care pathways — and we would rather build that experience properly when we get there than half-do it now. So for the moment, Ashwam focuses on the long, under-mapped stretch from the late 30s onward, where the absence of infrastructure is most acute and where the platform can go deepest.
If you are under 35 and what you want is a longitudinal record that grows with you for the next decade and beyond, Ashwam fits. If pregnancy or post-partum support is what you need, you will be better served elsewhere for now — and we will be honest with you when that changes.
Yes. Australia, India, Europe, and the UK are where Ashwam is running its in-person Listening Sessions. The platform launches publicly in August 2026, with rollout sequenced across countries in the months that follow.
The waitlist on the home page captures your country, so we can let you know as Ashwam becomes available where you live — wherever that is.
Ashwam is built around female physiology — the perimenopausal transition, hormonal patterns, and the ways women's biology has historically been understudied. Its architecture, its questions, and its baselines are designed for women's bodies.
The platform is for anyone whose biology this serves, including transgender women and non-binary people whose bodies move through similar transitions. It is not built around male physiology, and would not produce useful patterns for it.
A Listening Session is a small, private gathering of 10 to 15 women — a few hours of honest conversation about midlife, what we are noticing in our bodies, what feels unclear, where current health tools fall short.
It is not a workshop, not a panel, not a product pitch. There is no obligation to do anything afterward.
The sessions are running across cities in India, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States through 2026. Attending one does not require joining the Founding Circle or anything else. See the cities and dates →
Yes. Listening Sessions are off the record. What women share in the room stays in the room — nothing is recorded, nothing is attributed by name in any later writing or research, and nothing leaves with anyone but the person who said it.
The point of the room is honesty, and honesty is impossible without that protection. The notes Ashwam takes are about themes — what is showing up across many women's lives — not about individuals.
Not directly. The Listening Sessions are conversations, not app-access events — there is no obligation to use Ashwam afterward, and attending does not grant early access.
If you would like to use Ashwam, the two paths are the Founding Circle (a hundred women, eight weeks before public launch) and the public launch itself in August 2026. Some Founding Circle members will likely have attended a Listening Session, but the two are independent — you can do either, both, or neither.
More cities are being added through 2026. If your city is not yet listed and you would like Ashwam to consider it, the Listening Sessions page is the right place — fill the "keep me in the loop" form for the city closest to you, add a short note saying which city you would like, and we will add you to the list of cities we are watching.
Separately, if you would like to be told when the platform itself opens to the public in August 2026, the waitlist on the home page captures that interest by country.
The Founding Circle is a hundred women using Ashwam for eight weeks before public launch, beginning June 2026.
The daily commitment is five minutes — the in-app check-in across the dimensions of how you are doing. The weekly commitment is one Circle, online for most members and in person where Ashwam can meet, where we discuss what is working in the app, what is not, and what should be re-prioritised before public launch in August.
The Founding Circle is a validation cohort — testing what has been built — not a co-design body. The User Advisory Board, recruited from the Founding Circle after public launch, is the body that helps shape what comes next. More on the Founding Circle →
Yes. Founding Circle members have full access to the app at no cost during the eight-week beta.
Ongoing access at and after public launch will be communicated as the launch approaches and pricing is finalised. The Founding Circle commitment is your honest use of the app and participation in the weekly Circles — that is what is being asked, and what is being given back.
Ashwam is built by Shilpi Sharma, an exited founder from her last startup — Kvantum, an ML/AI platform for marketing measurement. She has built large-scale data systems across her career, most recently an intelligence platform reaching 115 million consumers in the US as Chief Strategy Officer at Yum Brands. Over the past year, Shilpi has built a small team of clinicians, engineers, designers and researchers across Australia, India and the United States.
The platform is independently funded at this stage, with grant applications in process for building the research platform and evidence engine. Ashwam is not building toward early venture-scale fundraising — it is building toward proof points first, evidence programmes second, and capital that follows the work.
Shilpi's path to Ashwam started with her own body. During her post-COVID recovery, she went through a full diagnostic workup to rule out autoimmune conditions — and on that journey she came to understand a structural problem in women's health: the data underlying today's diagnostics comes overwhelmingly from white women, which means non-white women are often at a disadvantage when it comes to early detection of disease. The gap is in the data.
That realisation pulled her into women's health research starting in 2021. She also began investing in women's health companies through Portfolia.
And most recently, as a perimenopausal woman, she found the same problem in her own life. The existing tools for understanding what was happening to her were either built around a population average, or around a single moment in time. She had a watch and a ring to learn a bit about sleep and activity, but none of it was connecting her lived experience in any meaningful way to the rest of her measurement. She also found that her clinicians had every good intention. They just never had her data.
A physicist by education and a technologist by heart, Shilpi decided to build a platform that not only supports women right away but also fills the data gap in women's health for the most understudied populations — enabling researchers, academicians, and providers to work from real longitudinal evidence, not population averages.
She also believes that the women who build their baselines now will be able to inform their daughters about their biology in a much deeper way than our mothers were ever able to do for us.
Ashwam works with clinicians across endocrinology, gynaecology, and integrative medicine; with researchers in longitudinal cohort design; and with operators experienced in building consumer health products at scale.
The team is being kept deliberately small at this stage, and the advisors are chosen for the depth they bring to specific questions rather than for breadth. As Ashwam grows, the advisory structure will be made more visible.
You see your data. Ashwam sees the derived signal needed to compute your baseline and surface your patterns — never raw values where they are not needed.
Your data is not sold. It is not shared with advertisers, employers, insurers, or anyone else without your explicit, granular consent. If you choose to share your record with your care team — your GP, gynaecologist, nutritionist — that sharing happens on your terms, and you can revoke it at any time.
The full data architecture is described in the Ethos page.
Some of Ashwam's longer-term mission is generating the evidence base women's health has historically lacked — through prospective, consented, longitudinal cohorts.
Participation in any research programme is opt-in, separate from using the app, and can be withdrawn at any time without affecting your access. Your data is never used for research without your specific consent for that specific programme.
The Ethos page describes the consent architecture in full.
A few terms that appear across this site. They are precise terms with technical meaning — here is what we mean by them, in plain language.
The questions women ask now will help shape what this page becomes. The two best ways to ask are inside the Founding Circle, or in person at a Listening Session.